nations to whom they trace their ancestry. Except for a few place names, even the language of America owes nothing to that of the Indians, for the English tongue, itself an Old World product, is a compound of Greek and Latin and French and German. Our literary beginnings, then, go back to two groups of educated English colonists, or immigrants; and our knowledge of these beginnings, to conditions in the divided England from which they came-the one group to Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607, and the other to Plymouth, Massachusetts, in 1620.

The English of the seventeenth century. The English of the early seventeenth century were an eager, restless, driving people. There was an active enthusiasm for the day's doings, a kind of living assent to Hamlet's commentary on "this goodly frame, the earth, . . . this most excellent canopy, the air, this brave o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire," and to the exclamation that follows: "What a piece of work is man! how noble in reason! how infinite in faculty in form and moving, how express and admirable! in action, how like an angel! in apprehension, how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals!" And under a strong and tactful monarch the nation had been kept at peace with itself. The splendid reign of the greatest of England's queens was just past. The country was secure from foreign invasion and confident in its strength. Great naval leaders had brought new honors to her name; great explorers had planted her flag on mysterious and new-discovered coasts; a group of dramatists had made the theater as popular as the movingpicture house of today; poets and novelists, preachers and statesmen, scientists and scholars, were all working alertly and keenly.

Yet England was on the verge of a great and sudden change, for in this fallow soil the seeds of conflict had been stealthily taking root; and when Elizabeth was followed on the throne by the vain and unkingly James I, the crop turned out to be a harvest of dragons' teeth. Puritan democrats and cavalier Royalists fought with each other over the body of England till

it was prostrate and helpless. Then followed the rise of Puritan power, the execution of Charles I, the establishment of the Commonwealth under the Cromwells from 1649 to 1660, and the peaceful restoration of monarchy at the latter date. It was in the mid-stages of these developments that the first settlements were made in English America. The rival factions contributed large numbers of vigorous pioneers. The Puritans were called Dissenters and Nonconformists because of their attitude toward the Established Church of England; but the Royalists who came over to America were, though loyal to the Church, simply nonconformists of another type, who preferred doing things out on the frontier to living conventional lives at home.

The Royalist colonists. The Royalists who came to Jamestown and the surrounding country set out, like other travelers and explorers of their day, to settle new English territory as a landed aristocracy in a series of great estates like those in the mother country. They were a mixed lot, but on the whole not an irreligious lot. They believed in the Established Church as they did in the established government, and they persecuted with a good will those who tried to observe other forms of worship than their own. They were, however, chiefly fortunehunters, just as were the men who surged out to California in 1849 (see page 365) or those who went to Alaska fifty years later; they hoped to make their money in the West and spend it in the East, and they had little thought of literature, either as a thing to enjoy or a thing to create. When they wrote they did so to give information about the country, the Indians, and the new conditions of living, or to keep in touch with relatives, legal authorities, or sources of money supply; and always they had in mind the thought of attracting new settlers, for of all their needs their need of labor was greatest. They made no attempt at general education, adopting the theory, long held by the ruling classes, that too much knowledge would be a dangerous source of discontent among the working people. Some few accounts and descriptions were written that are interesting to the modern reader, but these were seldom true of the people as a

whole or of anything permanently American. The writers were Englishmen away from home, settling for the time in Virgin-ia (the province named for the virgin queen, Elizabeth), in Jamestown, in the Carolinas (from the Latin for "Charles"), in Maryland, and, even as late as 1722, in Georg-ia.

The Puritan colonists. The Nonconformists whom adverse winds took against their will to Plymouth in 1620 were a very different folk. They were chiefly Puritan in prejudice and

upbringing. Many of their leaders were graduates of Cambridge University, who had become clergymen of the Church of England, only to be driven out of it because of their unchurchly preaching-born leaders who were brave enough to risk comfort and safety for conscience' sake. They came over to America in order, as Mrs. Hemans put it in her much-quoted poem, to have "freedom to worship God," but they had no intention of giving this freedom to others. They had endured so much for their religious faith that they wanted a place where this, and this only, should be tolerated. So they became, not illogically, the fiercest kind of persecutors, practicing with a vengeance the lessons they had learned in England at the cost of blood and suffering.

They settled in compact towns, where they could believe and worship together; they put up "meeting-houses," where they could listen to the preacher on the Lord's Day and where they could transact business with the same man as moderator" on week days (see page 182). He was a controlling power"pastor," or shepherd, and "dominie," or master, of the community. And when the meeting-houses and the jails were finished, the settlers erected as their next public buildings the schoolhouses, where the children might learn to read the Scriptures so that they could "foil the ould deluder, Satan." Furthermore, public education soon became compulsory. The Puritans' place names showed no respect for monarchy. They were either Indian-Massachusetts and Agawam; derived from England of Puritan associations, like Boston, Plymouth, and Falmouth; or quaintly Scriptural, like Marthas Vineyard, Providence, and Salem. These people, unlike the settlers in the South, came over to live and die in America. They wrote for the same social and business reasons that the Virginians did, but they also wrote much about their religion, compiled the "Bay Psalm Book," published sermons, and recorded their struggles-which began very early and were doomed to final failure to keep their New England free from "divers religions." At first their writings were sent to England for publication, but before long, in 1639, they had their own printing-press; and the things that were printed were not so much the sayings of individual men as the opinions of the community.

Tides of migration to Virginia and Massachusetts. The migration of the settlers to the North and the South in the seventeenth century reflected the course of the civil war in England. Up to 1640 colonization was slow and steady in both regions. From 1640 to 1660 immigration increased rapidly in the South and declined in the North, for in those years the grip of the Puritans on the old country relieved them from persecution there, and so from the need to avoid it, and at the same time made many Royalists glad for a chance to escape to some more peaceful spot. From 1660 on, with the return of

the old Royalists to power in England, Puritan migration was once again started toward the North, and the home country was once more secure for the followers of, the king. But the real characters of the two districts were unchanged. They were firmly established in the earlier years, and they have persisted clear up to the present time. The America of today is a compound in which the basic native qualities are inherited from the oldest traditions of aristocratic Virginia and the oldest traits of democratic and Puritan Massachusetts.

SUGGESTIONS FOR STUDY AND CLASS DISCUSSION

1. Who were the leaders in seventeenth-century England?

2. In what respects were the pioneer movements to Virginia and Massachusetts, to California, and to Alaska similar? In what respects were they essentially different?

3. What is meant by a landed aristocracy? In what different ways may extensive possessions be acquired? Do such aristocracies exist today? Read Goldsmith's "Deserted Village" and the latter part of Burns's "Cotter's Saturday Night" for comments on English conditions in the late eighteenth century.

4. Read Mrs. Hemans's poem "The Pilgrim Fathers."

5. Mention other place names that were given in deference to English royalty; other names of Indian derivation; names borrowed from old English towns; names drawn from the Bible; names in the Mississippi Valley recording French travel and settlement; names in the Far West recording Spanish travel and settlement; names derived from other historical or literary sources. Which kind is most common in your region? 6. The following questions may be answered from the Chronological Outlines (1607-1650) at the close of Chapter IV, pp. 46-47:

a. What are the first two important events and dates to remember in American history after 1600 ?

b. Who was the king on the English throne at the time? Who succeeded him in 1625? How long was his reign and what ended it? What is the name of the period in English history that followed it?

c. What king was on the French throne? What long war was ended in Europe in 1648?

d. With whom were the Americans having trouble, and in what did it result?